Arts & Culture | Film

The Torah scroll was very small, maybe the size of a grown man’s hand. It had been read in a place unimaginable in a sacred text, inside the very precincts of hell, as part of a bar mitzvah ceremony in the unlikeliest and worst place on earth, Bergen-Belsen. Now it was being carried on a journey almost as incomprehensible.

The musical thread that began this year’s New York Jewish Film Festival (with films about blues singer Doc Pomus and the iconic song “Hava Nagila,” among others) has persisted quite charmingly into the annual event’s final week.

Alicia Svigals, one of the great klezmer violinists working today, had written music for feature films and documentaries before, so she thought she knew what she was getting into when someone suggested she score a silent film. “The Yellow Ticket” is a 1918 German-made drama, restored under the auspices of the Foundation for Jewish Culture.